The moment Ukrainians destroy a Russian armored convoy in one of the biggest mechanized assaults since the beginning of the war VIDEO

Russia has lost at least 20 armored vehicles in the Donetsk region after launching one of its biggest mechanized assaults since the start of the war, The Telegraph reports.

Kiev forces repulsed a force of 36 tanks and 12 BPM infantry vehicles in a large-scale mechanized assault northwest of Avdiivka on March 30, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote, citing a military Ukrainian.

Footage of the assault posted on social media by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry shows a convoy of at least nine tanks and armored vehicles advancing down a road while under heavy fire.

“Ukrainian paratroopers from the 25th Airborne Brigade repulsed a massive Russian attack near the village of Tonenke. As a result, fighters [ucraineni] destroyed four Russian tanks and two IFVs”, announced the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on social networks.

Aerial images posted by the defense ministry capture only a fraction of the Russian losses, Ukrainian military bloggers reported, with an anonymous military official saying 12 Russian tanks and eight armored vehicles were destroyed in total during the assault.

Posting a video on Telegram, Ukraine’s 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade claimed to have killed nearly 1,300 Russian soldiers and destroyed 28 vehicles, including a tank and 17 armored vehicles.

In separate footage, a soldier can be seen successfully targeting a Russian tank with a Javelin missile. “Siceslav paratroopers destroyed an enemy tank along with its crew!”wrote the 25th Ukrainian Separate Brigade.

Geolocated images show a large number of damaged Russian vehicles along a road northwest of Tonenke, which ISW analysts and the British Ministry of Defense believe are likely to have been captured by Moscow forces.

The settlement is located about 13 km west of Avdiivka (Donetsk), which was captured by Russia in February in its biggest territorial advance since the capture of Bakhmut in May 2023.

Russian forces have not launched a mechanized assault on the scale of the weekend since Moscow’s attempts to capture Avdiivka began in late October, ISW said. Ukrainian forces then reportedly destroyed nearly 50 Russian tanks and more than 100 armored vehicles in a span of two days.

The Washington think tank added that the scale of this latest attack, carried out by Russia’s Sixth Tank Regiment, indicates that the Russian command may be prioritizing the Avdiivka area as a potential site for a spring offensive.

“The readiness of the Russian military command to commit a tank battalion to an attack near Avdiivka indicates that this assault was a priority effort”ISW analysts wrote.